Mirror Thinking by Fiona Murden

Author:Fiona Murden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472975799
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

PART THREE

GOOD AND BAD MIRRORING

CHAPTER EIGHT

Bad Role Models

On the morning of 7 November 2007, 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen should have been at school. Auvinen grew up in a town called Jokela in Tuusula, Finland, where he’d been born and raised. He attended the local secondary school, with 400 other pupils between the ages of 12 and 18.

Auvinen lived with his father Ismo, an amateur musician who worked on the Finnish railways, his mother Mikaela and his younger brother.1, 2 Ismo, so passionate about music, had named his son after the Finnish guitarist Pekka Järvinen and the English rock and blues guitarist Eric Clapton. Auvinen was an average student at school, had friends and didn’t get into any trouble. But on that morning he skipped his first lessons. Instead he sat at home on the internet uploading videos to YouTube. At 11.28am he turned his computer off and rode his bike the 1.7km from his home to school. It was a cold, grey, overcast day.

When he arrived at school he didn’t go through the main entrance, but through a door to the basement below the canteen where some of the students were having lunch. From there he made his way up to one of the corridors of classrooms where Joni Aaltonen and Nurmi Sameli waited for their English lesson to begin, busy chatting.3 In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Joni recalled what happened next:

‘He walked towards us calmly and slowly. We didn’t really pay him any attention. Then he stopped about two metres away from me and my friend. I looked up. He was watching us. He lifted his arm. He pointed the gun at me and started shooting.’4

Joni fled, but his best friend Nurmi didn’t manage to escape and was killed. Auvinen massacred five more students within the next six minutes before the headteacher had been able to make an announcement on the PA system: ‘Get into your classrooms immediately, lock the doors, and hide.’ Auvinen then carried on through the corridors shouting: ‘I’ll kill all of you.’ In total, he fired 69 bullets, killing eight people – five boys, two girls and the headteacher. He saved the final shot for himself.

A policeman described utter chaos at the scene, with students jumping from windows and scrambling for shelter.5 One of Auvinen’s teachers said: ‘It felt unreal – a pupil I have taught myself was running towards me, screaming, a pistol in his hand.’ He called the video he had uploaded on the morning of 7 November the ‘Jokela High School Massacre’.

How could this happen? This was a boy from a seemingly normal, stable family in Finland, a country known to be peaceful, with one of the best schooling systems in the world. He wasn’t behaving like this as a mirror to his friends, teachers or anyone else in his immediate environment. Was he mirroring anyone at all? And if so who and why?

The Ministry of Justice compiled a report following the massacre looking at the lead-up to the attack. It

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